The Lover is easy to watch and even easier to forget. A pleasant enough piece of commercial sensuality from French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, its selling point is its very pretty, clothing-optional sex scenes. Their effectiveness, however, is undercut by an air of self-congratulatory pomposity that the film is way too insubstantial to support.

A movie that wants to be hard-hitting and gritty but lacks the stomach for the job, it meanders through what should be a lean and focused narrative and ends up more of a letdown than anything else.

Dr. Giggles is one horror comedy that actually is laugh-out-loud funny, a fast and frequently hilarious collision of gore and gags, and a tour de force of smart, sophisticated exploitation filmmaking. It’s an exciting feature directorial debut for Manny Coto.

Candyman, the latest Clive Barker shocker, is his worst to date: an ambitious would-be morality play/thriller of the supernatural involving racism and mythology that seems merely pretentious and preposterous as it drowns in gallons of blood and guts. [16 Oct 1992, p.F6]

A somewhat diverting but finally disappointing thriller, it is characterized by a premise even Pat Buchanan could love: If you so much as think about straying from the marital straight and narrow, all heck is sure to break loose.

Loving and well-intentioned though this film is, it never convinces you that its subject matter merits this kind of idealized, worshipful attention. [09 Oct 1992]

Everything about the movie is overscaled, overbrutal, overbroad, full of holes. Yet there's something cheerful and wacky about it; it's a light-hearted blood bath.

If 1492 is dramatically inert, it is just the opposite visually. Its director is Ridley Scott, a wizard at re-creating the look of other realities, and he's done a remarkable job here, filling the screen with ravishing sequences from both the Old World and the New that are dazzling and intoxicating.

A great movie could be pulled from this horror but writer-director Geoffrey Wright gets taken in by all the mayhem and clobbering.

Most of the movie is like the ice on which Bombay's limousine rests: cold and shaky. The only time it really comes alive is in the obvious scene, the fast, furious championship, with every Duck having his day.

Is there enough reason for Gary Sinise to have remade Of Mice and Men? You can respond to Steinbeck’s qualities of feeling in the movie, but Sinise, who directed as well as stars as the itinerant ranch hand George opposite John Malkovich’s hulking, feeble-minded Lennie, doesn’t really make the material his own. It’s a “distinguished” piece of filmmaking in that somewhat lifeless, classical tradition where all the actors seem a bit too posed to be believable and all the colors seem too bright and varnished.

Haphazard and erratic, involving only in fits and starts, Hero’s core is nevertheless so shrewdly and gleefully cynical about public heroism and the cult of celebrity it is impossible not to be at least sporadically amused and entertained.

Tarantino's palpable enthusiasm, his unapologietic passion for what he's created, reinvigorates this venerable plot and, mayhem aside, makes it involving for longer than you might suspect. [27 Oct 1992]

The Last of the Mohicans comes at you like a tomahawk. Hard, fast and brutal, it slashes at your throat and just about leaves you for dead. Undeniably exciting as this definitely is, however, its impact comes at the expense of some of the gentler virtues, qualities that even top-drawer barn-burners really shouldn't ignore.

There are marvelous moments from Don Rickles as Sal’s nouveau riche attorney--"Don’t murder a cop on my front lawn!” he exclaims hilariously--and from Elaine Kagan as his terror-stricken, lacquered wife. There are also plenty of unbilled cameos, a Landis trademark, along with moments from beloved old films glimpsed on TV.

This superman approach to character doesn't jibe with David's crisis of conscience. His smothering of his Jewish identity may make dramatic sense, but, the way it's enacted, it doesn't make much psychological sense. As Fraser plays him, David has such a robust sense of identity that his covertness isn't really believable. We keep hoping the film will turn into a movie about a kid who declared his Jewishness and fought the consequences.

Captain Ron is a movie about trapped suburbanites who break out into romantic seas, but it never really leaves suburbia. Its spiritual home is in the shopping mall. Like the Cap'n himself, this movie guzzles up its dreams and ignores the busted engine.

Despite its good performances--Minns, Lumbly, Shelby and Best, as well as Plummer--South Central lacks a certain juice, heat and life. It doesn’t boil with the energy you’d expect from a gang picture, and it doesn’t have the density or rich atmosphere of a Boyz N the Hood, Do the Right Thing or New Jack City.

Singles is a bright and beautiful piffle about love American-style, junior division.

Despite the presence of a college-aged siren that Allen’s married, fiftysomething character becomes intoxicated with, this assured, penetrating film is no sentimental homage to May-December infatuations. Rather, Husbands and Wives is a lacerating comedy about love turned sour, a painful, deeply pessimistic yet somehow funny look at how caring relationships wind up as destructive emotional dead-ends.

Ballard has infused Wind with an old-fashioned romantic sentimentality that is affecting from time to time. But this and everything else that is good about the picture fights an ultimately losing battle against an inept story that feels like it was constructed from bits and pieces of other, presumably more involving films. It's a shame that director Ballard, who has gone many years between features, has had to set out this time in such a leaky and unsound vessel.

Those looking for sheer gore for its own sake probably won't be disappointed by Hellraiser III, but those expecting the quality of the first film in the series most likely will be. [14 Sep 1992, p.F8]

This is a film that knows enough not to take itself too seriously, and watching the gang wryly adjusting to each other's quirks and foibles is diverting enough to quash any lingering cavils. [09 Sep 1992, p.F1]

It works best when it’s at its loosest and most improvisatory. Whenever the seams in the script show, the film loses its grit and takes on the aspects of a made-for-TV drama about runaways.

In addition to leaving a question mark around the issue of Delbert's guilt or innocence, Brother's Keeper, which Berlinger co-directed with Bruce Sinofsky, opens up several complex areas of debate. Among them: the differing codes of behavior governing city and country life; the inaccurate, stereotyped beliefs each realm has about the other; community loyalty; incest; the socializing effects of media and the manner in which we acquire language.

Audacious, bracing, uncommonly timely, Bob Roberts would seem almost impossible to pull off. So it is very much to Robbins' credit as a filmmaker that he manages to do so while rarely getting preachy and never neglecting the importance of movement and excitement in keeping an audience involved. [04 Sep 1992, p.F1]

It's the most outwardly sleazy of all Lynch's movies, the rawest and raunchiest, the least circumspect. Full of striptease and scandal, violence, orgy and feverish nightmare, the movie is a kind of mass opening of the sewers that always lay beneath Twin Peaks' placid streets... But it does cap off a pop-cultural landmark, with all the bad taste and high style required. [31 Aug 1992]

Pet Sematary II, which is too gruesome for grammar school youngsters and too easily laughed off for most high schoolers, ought to be a big hit among the junior high crowd. Not nearly as scary as the 1989 original, it nonetheless expresses and attempts to resolve in bold mythological terms the anxieties of being 13.

Though Honeymoon in Vegas has one of his most accessible premises, Andrew Bergman has never been to everyone's taste and probably never will. He is something of a spritzer in the Mel Brooks mode, someone who spews out such a torrent of manic material that by definition not all of it is going to work. But in an age where screen comedy tends to fit snugly in a handful of pre-set synthetic molds, his all-natural craziness comes as a special treat. Especially if you like to laugh. [28 Aug 1992, p.F2]

A film that is genuinely mind-expanding, an exhilarating intellectual gantlet that tells a remarkable human story.

The entire thrust of this provocative, harrowing yet ironically exhilarating film is to make it clear that ultimately, alienated by the AIDS virus rather than by sexual orientation, Jon and Luke have only each other. [21 Aug 1992, p.F10]

Johnny Suede has an astonishingly consistent tone and a remarkably talented and cohesive cast. [21 Aug 1992]

Schroeder is too fine-tuned a director for this roomie-from-hell claptrap, and his attempts to work in references to Polanski's films or to Ingmar Bergman's Persona only reinforce the pulpiness.

Ritter, Dawber and Jones are skilled comedians, and director Peter Hyams typically handles large-scale entertainments with aplomb. But it’s hard to see how anyone could have made anything out of something as flat as Stay Tuned.

Simultaneously heroic and nihilistic, reeking of myth but modern as they come, it is a Western for those who know and chrish the form, a film that resonates with the spirit of films past while staking out a territory quite its own. [7 Aug 1992]

A lively, good-looking kiddie action comedy best left to those under 10. Although their attention may wander, parents can be grateful that there's some substance as well as fun in this Disney release, for martial arts is presented as a matter of defense rather than aggression, emphasizing that it is a matter of mind and spirit as well as body and requiring resourcefulness and discipline.

De Palma clearly did not want to do a conventional thriller, and so his considerable prowess in that area is only occasionally brought to bear. As a result, despite a few finely creepy moments that remind us of his talent, the shocking parts of Raising Cain feel lethargic and lacking in purpose.

Actress Kristy Swanson provides the ideal combination of energy and comic disdain that characterize a most unlikely savior. While it would be a mistake to oversell Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the sad and/or happy truth is that you could do worse on a warm summer night. A lot worse. [31 Jul 1992, p.1]

Death Becomes Her is a black comedy that is so pleased with its blackness it frequently forgets to be funny. [31 July 1992, p.F1]

How can one dislike this movie? It has wit, romance, gentle rebellion, idyllic landscapes and fine actors savoring luscious lines. Only the undercurrent may bother a few: the hints of feminist revolt, beneath the sparkly surface. Enchanted April--based on a 1923 novel by Elizabeth Von Arnim--is a pure wish-fulfillment story, but there's an acid edge to it.

Wuhl is occasionally touching, and his blank-faced disbelief can be very funny; he has the addled look of a shell-shocked aesthete. But for the most part Marvin's funk doesn't bring out Wuhl's sharpest talents; he needs a role with more spring and less vacant staring-off-into-the-distance. And Primus needs a project that will sustain his gift for transforming a group of disparate actors into a spirited jamboree. [21 Aug 1992, p.F11]

It's one more example of minuscule ideas inflated to preposterous proportions: An Attack of the 50-Foot Marketing Hook. [17 Jul 1992, p.F10]

But the erotic potential of animation has never been realized and Cool World doesn't even try. [11 Jul 1992]

It may be standard-issue stuff, but it looks great and it almost makes you nostalgic for the days when stuntmen reigned supreme and mayhem and computers never knew how much they had in common.

If that wistful, cleareyed melancholy were its primary mood, Gas Food Lodging might have been a little masterpiece. It isn't -- but it's good enough. Anders gets the externals of her vision of Laramie: a world of high skies, searing deserts, dusty stores and roads that vanish into a flat horizon. And the internals: the bickering, hurts, dreams and little everyday epiphanies. If many movies avoid or disguise the world, shining it up beyond recognition, Gas Food Lodging takes the opposite approach, a better one. It jumps right into life, faces it with careless affection, clarity and courage. [14 Aug 1982, p.F8]

The Danish director, whose film Pelle the Conqueror won the best foreign-language film Oscar, has turned out a thoughtful and accomplished piece of filmmaking, skillfully acted and beautifully put together with a kind of discreet elegance that the biggest budget (roughly $10 million) in Swedish film history made possible.

With its perspectives on love, aging and solitude, "Prelude to a Kiss" still offers a good deal more than the usual smiles of a summer's day. [10 Jul 1992, p.F14]

A film that is more listless than funny and could surely use some of the energy that animated both Art Buchwald and Paramount Pictures in the lawsuit surrounding authorship of [Eddie Murphy]'s 1988 "Coming to America." [01 Jul 1992]

Though amusing enough to avoid absolutely drowning in schmaltz, it's sad to see a film with potential lose its way in the late innings.

A cut above the average thriller. For one thing, it's put together with enough professionalism to make you almost (but not quite) forget the implausibilities that films like this are inevitably prone to. And for another, its concern with cops getting out of line seems hardly far-fetched after what the world saw happening to Rodney G. King.

Batman Returns, the most eagerly awaited and aggressively hyped film of the summer, is, for better and worse, very much the product of director Tim Burton's morose imagination. His dark, melancholy vision is undeniably something to see, but it is a claustrophobic conception, not an expansive one, oppressive rather than exhilarating, and it strangles almost all the enjoyment out of this movie without half trying.

Despite a high-powered cast and a zany/trendy concept, hardly anyone’s home in Housesitter. The result is much ado about too little, an occasionally amusing screwball farce made by people whose screws are barely loose at all.

No one who sees the last half-hour of this movie will ever forget it--though quite a few may want to.

It’s not a bad film. Brightly designed, slickly paced, it has its cargo of youth elements: laughs, sexual tease, action and music. But, halfway through, you can almost feel everyone relaxing, waiting for the next bit of spiritless slapstick or car-chase to carry them through to the end.

Graced with a clever script, a cast that will make you smile until you ache, and a snappy sense of pace, this summer '92 hit is the funniest by-the-numbers comedy in who knows how long.

It's strong as can be in terms of production values and panoramic photography (as befits its $70-million budget) and weak as watery tea when it comes to little things like dialogue and character development. [22 May 1992]

Although Alien 3 is stylish--and ambitious--the movie doesn't have the soul or guts to sustain that ambition. It gets swallowed up in its own technology and genre expectations. And Fincher gets stalled in the drama, trapped in too many scenes of talking heads looming out of the gloom.

There are a lot of funny ideas in Encino Man that don't come off because the director, Les Mayfield, and his screenwriter, Shawn Schepps, don't seem to have made up their minds how smart they want to be. A scene like Link freaking out during a visit to the La Brea tar pits museum should count for a lot more than it does here.

Von Trier is undeniably talented, but Zentropa, which won the 1991 Jury Prize at Cannes, comes across mostly as an exercise in pseudo-profundity. It’s got more metaphors than it knows what to do with.

The latest, and, one fears, not the last episode in the kiss-kiss-bang-bang saga of L.A. police Detectives Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) and Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) is even more of a comic strip than its immediate predecessor. [15 May 1992]

For most of the way, One False Move is taut and sure-footed.

Poison Ivy suffers from a basic dramatic hitch. We in the audience are so far ahead of the people on the screen that there are no surprises, just the inevitable sound of the inevitable shoe dropping.

It’s hard to think of a less satisfying creature feature in recent memory than the simply terrible Split Second, which by the end not only has allowed few glimpses of the beast in question but hasn’t even explained where the big guy came from or what kind of animus, supernatural or otherwise, is responsible for its strange m.o. It’s a monstrous cheat.

It’s possible to enjoy White Sands from moment to moment because the actors are avid and the New Mexico locations are delicately beautiful. Still, there’s something disconcerting about this anything-for-effect style of filmmaking. It doesn’t add up to anything satisfying.

It's hard to remember when actors have stepped into such a no-win situation and mustered up such panache: Turturro may be on a sinking ship, but he manages to drown brilliantly.

Director Charles Martin Smith and the four credited writers go for all-out zaniness, naturally, but it comes off like lowest-level Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker-Proft -- less Jay Ward than failed Mad magazine. [17 Apr 1992, p.F28]

The script by Bean and Tolkin is potentially more interesting than what’s been made of it.

Newsies becomes a string of set-pieces, some of which work, some of which don't, all barreling full-speed ahead toward its Teddy Roosevelt deus ex machina. [10 Apr 1992]

Morbid, silly and ultra-violent, Stephen King's Sleepwalkers is pure trash from the popular horrormeister. It is so bad that surely the only way that it could have been made was to have King's name on it.

With its bright colors, upbeat rock soundtrack and strong ecological message, FernGully...The Last Rainforest should delight children and amuse their older siblings and parents.

Even when Griffin has a heart of stone, Tim Robbins is lacking in the knid of ice-cold magnetism that allows a thorough bastard to hold the screen like nobody's business. [10 Apr 1992]

The film itself is playful, weird, unpredictable and a bit tasteless. [10 Apr 1992]

Thunderheart, directed by Michael Apted, is a kind of spiritual thriller, a moderately diverting programmer in which a predictable shoot-'em-up plot is slickly intertwined with American Indian religious customs and beliefs. Though the film has a tendency to take itself too seriously, it is enlivened by some appealing acting and vivid camerawork that save it from the abyss.

Graced with good-humored comic energy, they overcome sizable script problems and turn Ron Shelton's White Men Can't Jump into a sassy and profane urban fairy tale that finds laughs in some very clever places.

Seeing a movie that doesn’t know the meaning of shameless, that refuses to worry about plausibility, that acts as if subtlety hadn’t been invented yet, does have a very basic kind of intrinsically cinematic pull.

Though it’s basically a kids’ movie with a cartoonish structure, it’s laced with lewd innuendo: jokes that suggest teen-age sex, homosexuality and even pedophilia. The core of the humor is raunchy, but the tone is sunny and even-tempered. It even tries to go for a few inspirational moments: feminist statements or sermonettes about overcoming fear and realizing potential.

The off-the-rink sequences bristle with as much passion and energy as the dazzling skating sequences, featuring some of the world’s greatest figure skaters.

A reminder of the difference between exhilaration and exhaustion, between tension and hysteria, between eroticism and exhibitionism. The line may be fine, but it is real enough to separate the great thrillers from the also-rans. And Basic Instinct is not a great thriller.

What you’re left with is a lot of bustle and jabber, and occasional sparks from the cast. Caine has some fine comic moments of high exasperation, there’s great wit in the way Burnett arches her eyebrows and, as a besotted trouper, Denholm Elliott’s puttery calm is like a balm amid the delirium. It’s a delirium that finally seems more appropriate to the sitcom than to the stage.

Because it is confident of its story and its powers, “Howards End” takes the time to establish itself, to allow its characters the space to demonstrate subtlety and complexity.

Given the temptations to goof it up, Pesci's performance in My Cousin Vinny is something of a triumph. As Vincent Gambini, a swaggering pint-sized New York lawyer who only recently passed the bar on his sixth try, Pesci modulates his usual psycho-nuttiness and gives it some recognizably human, even melancholy, undertones. The movie is a very mixed bag, but it's not quite the dumb fest that the TV spots make it out to be. Pesci gives Vinny's ultimate vindication a note of bittersweet triumph.

Every scene in this cautionary tale about science running amok has spectacular views, unusual camera angles and moves, or dazzlingly outre computer effects. And every scene, story-wise, gets mushier and more outlandish or perfunctory--until the movie seems disengaged from itself.

Though it doesn't really work, there are enjoyable things about it.

It has a trashy, low-road, rabble-rousing spirit but it also has high-road pretensions. It’s a violent movie that wants to make an anti-violence “statement,” the oldest ploy in the boxing film genre.

The special effects tricks are often nifty, but where's the wit? Memoirs of an Invisible Man doesn't earn its seriousness. It fades into invisibility while you're watching it.

Directed by Mellencamp from a script by Larry McMurtry, the result is a curious, wayward blend of small-town anomie and intrigue and hero-worshipping narcissism. [21 Feb 1992, p.F10]

The Wayne's World concept, which, egged on by a rabid studio audience, works so beautifully in skit format, ends up feeling dragged out and energy-less at feature length. [14 Feb 1992 Pg. F1]

There are nice things in Medicine Man but it only works perfectly when it leaves its characters up a tree. [07 Feb 1992, p.F10]

Watching this San Francisco-based film is a bit like looking at "Vertigo" through several heavy layers of scrim.

Despite the awkwardness of much of the staging, and the unevenness of the script, the movie does give you a sense of real people living real lives. [14 Feb 1992, p.B9]

Fried Green Tomatoes is a folksy enigma, an ordinary film blessed with a number of out-of-the-ordinary performances. Not only does its plot deal in part with women stuck in unhappy circumstances, its very existence makes you wonder how its trapped actresses managed to make the best of a dramatically disheartening situation. [27 Dec 1991, p.F1]

Though it is a vivid, promising piece of work from first-time director Ernest R. Dickerson, it also shows how difficult it's becoming to deal with this material in any kind of fresh manner.

The film’s premise is promising but undeveloped.

But the film isn’t just a well-made TV-style thriller either. It’s on to something--the way upwardly mobile parents, hoping to make their lives more professionally fulfilling, unwittingly bring the danger of the unknown into their lives.

With moments of odd, dark humor sprinkled among the violence, this traditional study of psycho kittens in love breaks just enough new ground to be an impressive piece of work.

Light Sleeper, with its cool, critical view of life on the edge, is no film to dismiss or ignore. It's a failure perhaps, but an honorable failure. If it isn't saved by grace, it has many saving graces.

It's a movie for people who really dig Cronenberg's mulchy fixations-and probably for no one else. [27 Dec 1991]

A poetic attempt to re-create a bygone culture as not only a role model for the present but also a positive mythology for the future, the movie's strong visual qualities and epic emotions make it a bracing remedy to swallow.